


April Showers

by Lunamaria (Kapori)



Category: Tangled (2010)
Genre: But she's still your mother, Gen, When your mother is a complete villain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-14
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2019-05-06 21:01:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14656161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kapori/pseuds/Lunamaria
Summary: She hated her mother...and yet.





	April Showers

_April Showers_

.

.

.

It was the first crack of thunder that woke her.

Rapunzel tossed herself onto her side, instantly alert and awake. She gasped for air, as if she had been thrust underwater for too long. She took three quick breathes as her frightened senses began to slow and the room around her rematerialized. It was then she understood, piece by piece, of what had happened.

Once again she had been jolted from the remains of yet another nigh terror. Her heart still pounded like a frantic, hunted creature, but it slowed as she picked apart the real from the nightmare.

Rapunzel sighed heavily. She collapsed back into her sheets, and, after a moment, reached a hand behind her back to remind herself she wasn't alone.

_I'm not alone. It was just a dream._

Eugene stirred slightly as she set her hand carefully across his chest, checking for the rising and falling of each of his deep, slumbering breaths. He was alive. There, breathing and alive and well.

With that relief, she gathered a sheet around her, setting her bare feet on the cold ground below. Carefully, she crept from the bed.

She didn't go far, only a few feet.

The doors to their balcony hung open, and through them Rapunzel could see the rain and the bright flickering of lightning in the distance. The thunder followed, as it had for the past several nights as storm after storm rolled through. It did not make sleep easy, and seemed to bring on more nightmares than usual. The thunder always had.

Rapunzel tiptoed over to the open chair by the balcony doors, blanket bunched around her shoulders. There she watched the heavy curtain of rain, watched the sky light up in stretches of lightning, heard the clouds moan and scream and drum. It was there, lost in the music of the storm, that she embraced the memory.

Her mother had always been home when it rained; it was why Rapunzel always loved stormy weather, even if the thunder jarred her throughout the day and night. With only the rounded walls of her small tower, filled inch by inch, and Pascal, to fill her day, having her mother home felt like a miracle.

Her mother was her anchor point, her moon, and Rapunzel was a tide drawn back and forth by her mother's designs. Her mother was everything, her universe, her relief from the cramped space of her tower and captivity. To know that she was safe from the terrors of the outside world, sheltered and protected by her mother, was sometimes enough to ease the loneliness of her burden.

Even after all had been revealed and changed, Gothel still felt like her mother. She had raised Rapunzel, taught Rapunzel, been everything to Rapunzel for eighteen years. The queen, of course, was also her mother. Her real one, the one who had brought her life and fought to keep her well with the magic of a golden flower.

But if the rain had proven anything, it was that her heart could have two mothers. Even if one was wicked and cruel and terrible. The heart was not a sensible creature; it could not be taught whom to love and whom not to love, as if it were a matter of will. It would love all sorts of wrong things and people without permission. Rapunzel knew that well, more than she wished.

Her heart stung with its foolish ache of love for a mother who did not deserve it, and it brought her to tears. They were ridiculous, nonsensical tears, but like the heart, tears could not be reasoned with.

That woman had tried to kill the man she loved, caused her, even now, to wake in the middle of the night tumbling free of nightmares like a mad woman. That monster still frightened her out of countless nights of sleep, damp with sweat and chest heaving with panicked breath.

Because of her mother, she would always be afraid Eugene had never survived. She would always need to prove to herself, fresh from a nightmare, that he lived. To throw her hand out, grasping for the feel of him beside her, waiting for the movement of breath within his chest.

She hated her mother.

And yet.

No matter what her mother had done, and by heavens there was no sense to it, she loved her. The thing Rapunzel learned on nights like these, curled up before the raw of nature, was that people could not chose whom to love. They could not choose whom they felt compassion for, either, or whom they hated. For Rapunzel felt all those things towards her mother.

 _People..._ _people are impossible creatures_ , she thought.

And she wondered, very wistfully there before the rain and thunder and lightning, if maybe her mother had loved her too. Maybe despite all she had devised and schemed, she had grown this impossible, impractical love for her daughter within her cruel, selfish heart. Perhaps it confused her too, that she could love this person she shouldn't. That eighteen years together had created this foolish impossibility of love within her too, even if she had betrayed it in the end.

 _Somewhere_ , thought Rapunzel,  _somewhere inside of her, it must have been true._

As her thoughts lingered over the memory of her mother, for what seemed liked hour after hour, Rapunzel felt a hand settle softly on her shoulder.

Maybe this would be the night that was different.

Maybe this night she would tell him about the impossibility of her heart, of the doubt and confusion each strike of thunder brought alive within her. She was not the type to conceal anything from him, especially her feelings, but she had managed this one. She had managed to keep the thoughts of her mother from him, as though she had locked them away in a tower, hidden from bitter truth of the world.

She especially kept the love to herself, her irrational, hopeless love.

Maybe she could tell him this night.

"Eugene," she said quietly, pulling his hand into both of hers. He heard the strain in her voice, the odd inflection of emotion.

"Rapunzel?" he said, coming to rest on his knees before her, rubbing a thumb just under both eyes.

Sure enough, the tears fell again, past her cheeks and onto his fingers. With one tear came the next, and there was just no stopping them, as there was no stopping the rain just outside the protection of the castle.

"Eugene," Rapunzel said, voice trembling with each word, "I miss her so much, Eugene. I miss her so much."

They had rarely spoken together of her mother before, but it didn't matter. He knew her heart, and he let her be. It was a complicated matter to begin with, and she deserved the rights she had been denied for so many years - to decide if she would keep those feelings or set them free.

Regardless, he knew.

The odd thing with people, he knew, was that there was no stopping love. You couldn't simply love someone for years and years and then discard all of that without a glance back. Perhaps there were those that said otherwise, but he knew better. Love was love, and love was incomprehensible. Even to bad mothers.

Eugene led Rapunzel, one hand at the small of her back, to bed and held her there through all of the rain for that night and for the many others following.

It was the best thing anyone could do for a crying wife.

**Author's Note:**

> Note: Rewritten 1/29/2016. Hope you liked it. And... I think it's cute she calls him Eugene.


End file.
